There are some things I can't resist, and Clint Eastwood playing a grumpy old baseball scout for the Atlanta Braves would be one of them. He's old, his contract is about to expire, and he's having serious eye problems. So naturally he's the one who has to scout the hotshot phenom that Atlanta's considering taking with their top pick in the draft. The hotshot with the computer doesn't think Clint can do the job and that his computer already knows what's best. Eastwood's character is named Gus, and he has a daughter, Mickey (Amy Adams), who's semi-estranged. Gus' choice. Gus' old friend (John Goodman) persuades Mickey to join her dad for a few days. She does, even though it puts at risk her hopes of becoming a partner in the law firm where she works. Justin Timberlake, a former player once recruited by Gus and now a scout for the Red Sox, shows up and is naturally attracted to Mickey.

Once all the pieces are in place, the movie follows a predictable path, but it's so well acted and written that I didn't care. I kind of like predictability, I guess, at least some of the time. I'm willing to overlook a lot of implausible stuff, too.I made a prediction of my own before we went to the movie, and it was dead on the money. When we walked into the back of the theater and looked out over the crowd, it was like looking at a sea of Q-Tips. So now you know the movie's target audience. Whippersnappers, beware.

When Authors of Adult Literature Write for Children: It can be said that most authors primarily stick to one style of writing or one genre in their literary career. However, this is not the case with this selection of books. The authors here are all known for their works that appeal to adult readers but have also written children's books.

Southern Discomfort: Tumultuous Literature set in the American South.: The American South offers famous food, memorable music and honest hospitality, but why do so many authors dwell on the dark side of this region? Books like Their Eyes Were Watching God by Zora N. Hurston, Alex Haley’s Roots and The Color Purple by Alice Walker are acclaimed, but harrowing. Discrimination of all kinds, voodoo and other black arts, violence and murder, incest and rape – you will find them all prominently featured in Southern-themed literature.

Not too long ago I was in a Half-Price Books and saw this copy of Valley Beyond Time. It was published in 1973, but it looked as fresh as if it had just come from the printer. I don't know where it's been all those years, but I couldn't resist picking it up. It contains four novellas, two from Science Fiction Adventures ("Valley Beyond Time" and "The Flame and the Hammer"), one from SFA's sister publication, Infinity ("Spacerogue"), and one from If ("The Wages of Death). In his introduction to the book, Silverberg says that these aren't the kinds of stories he writes anymore, as they'd been written about 15 years previously.

I read all four of the stories, probably for the second time, as I was a big fan of the SF digests (particularly the three where these tales appeared) in the late 1950s. I'm sure that none of them could be published in the few remaining digests. Things have changed, and so have Silverberg's stories. He could write for any market, and in the '50s, he wrote for a bunch of them. Crime, SF, western, softcore erotica, you name it, he wrote it, and very successfully. In these four stories you get starships, FTL travel, exotic societies, and strange, powerful inventions. You get action and romance (not too much romance, though, and none at all in two of the four stories). You get old-fashioned adventure and storytelling. If that's what you're looking for, you can't go wrong here.

NYTimes.com: Ashbel Green, a widely respected editor in the publishing industry who shepherded more than 500 books into print for Alfred A. Knopf, including detective novels, the autobiography of Walter Cronkite and the works of Gabriel Garcia Marquez, died on Tuesday in Westerly, R.I. He was 84.

Atomic Renaissance: American Women Mystery Writers of the 1940s and 1950s: Jeffrey Marks: Amazon.com: Kindle Store: America in the 1950s was a place of Eisenhower, the Korean Conflict, McCarthy, and Sputnik. Women found themselves trapped into a mold of Donna Reed and June Cleaver, marginalized by the hyper-masculinity of the age. Mystery fiction had become a male bastion as well, promoting hardboiled private eye novels and spy fiction. It would be another three decades before groups to promote equality between the sexes in mystery fiction appeared. Yet during that post-World War II era, seven women carved out a place in the genre. These women became the bestsellers of their time by innovation and experimentation. Margaret Millar, Patricia Highsmith, Leslie Ford, Charlotte Armstrong, Dorothy B. Hughes, Mignon Eberhart, and Phoebe Atwood Taylor are in no way similar to each other in style, theme, or subject matter. However, their writings created an Atomic Renaissance that continues to impact the mystery field today.

New York, NY; London, UK—Hard Case Crime, the award-winning line
of pulp-styled crime novels published by Titan Books, announced it
will publish JOYLAND, a new novel by Stephen King, in June 2013. Set
in a small-town North Carolina amusement park in 1973, JOYLAND tells
the story of the summer in which college student Devin Jones comes
to work as a carny and confronts the legacy of a vicious murder, the
fate of a dying child, and the ways both will change his life
forever. JOYLAND is a brand-new book and has never previously
been published. One of the most beloved storytellers of all
time, Stephen King is the world’s best-selling novelist, with more
than 300 million books in print.Called "the best new American publisher to appear in the last
decade" by Neal Pollack in The Stranger, Hard Case Crime
revives the storytelling and visual style of the pulp paperbacks of
the 1940s, 50s, and 60s. The line features an exciting mix of lost
pulp masterpieces from some of the most acclaimed crime writers of
all time and gripping new novels from the next generation of great
hardboiled authors, all with new painted covers in the grand pulp
style. Authors range from modern-day bestsellers such as Pete
Hamill, Donald E. Westlake, Lawrence Block and Ed McBain to Golden
Age stars like Mickey Spillane (creator of "Mike Hammer"), Erle
Stanley Gardner (creator of "Perry Mason"), Wade Miller (author of
Touch of Evil), and Cornell Woolrich (author of Rear
Window). Stephen King commented, "I love crime, I love mysteries, and I
love ghosts. That combo made Hard Case Crime the perfect venue for
this book, which is one of my favorites. I also loved the paperbacks
I grew up with as a kid, and for that reason, we’re going to hold
off on e-publishing this one for the time being. Joyland will
be coming out in paperback, and folks who want to read it will have
to buy the actual book." King’s previous Hard Case Crime novel, The Colorado Kid,
became a national bestseller and inspired the television series
"Haven," now going into its third season on SyFy."Joyland is a breathtaking, beautiful, heartbreaking book," said
Charles Ardai, Edgar- and Shamus Award-winning editor of Hard Case
Crime. "It’s a whodunit, it’s a carny novel, it’s a story about
growing up and growing old, and about those who don’t get to do
either because death comes for them before their time. Even the most
hardboiled readers will find themselves moved. When I finished it, I
sent a note saying, ‘Goddamn it, Steve, you made me cry.’"Nick Landau, Titan Publisher, added: "Stephen King is one of the
fiction greats, and I am tremendously proud and excited to be
publishing a brand-new book of his under the Hard Case Crime
imprint."JOYLAND will feature new painted cover art by the legendary
Robert McGinnis, the artist behind the posters for the original Sean
Connery James Bond movies and "Breakfast At Tiffany’s," and by Glen
Orbik, the painter of more than a dozen of Hard Case Crime’s most
popular covers, including the cover for The Colorado Kid.

The Hollywood Reporter: The femme-skewing network has made a script order for "Wunderland," a contemporary reimagining centered on a young female detective in present-day Los Angeles who discovers another world that exists under the surface of this ultra-modern city.

ICBS Connecticut: A Navy officer who was dismissed last month as commander of a Connecticut-based nuclear submarine faked his own death to end an affair he was carrying on with a mistress, investigation documents show.
Navy Cmdr. Michael P. Ward II was relieved of his duties aboard the USS Pittsburgh a week after taking command of the attack submarine.

AbeBooks: An enduring feature of mountaineering is that achievement and disaster are closely linked. The triumph of an historic ascent can be painfully affected by the perilous descent. As the conquering spirit of modern man has taken mountaineers to faraway places to climb mountains by ever more difficult means, one outstanding legacy is a rich narrative of text for the collector. This is as true nowadays as it was during the infancy of mountaineering.

'DAG' Actor Dies At 48: Actor Stephen Dunham (néBowers) is dead at age 48. According to Variety, the cause of death was a heart attack the television actor had suffered a few days earlier, before dying on Sept. 14 at Providence St. Joseph’s Hospital in Burbank, Calif. Dunham was a prolific actor who appeared on a number of television shows, including ABC's "Hot Properties," "Just Shoot Me!" and, perhaps most memorably, "DAG," on which he played Edward Pillows. He also made appearances in the films "The Mummy" and "Monster-in-Law." He is set to star as part of a wedded couple in the upcoming "Paranormal Activity" with his real-life wife, actress Alexondra Lee.Hat tip to Jeff Meyerson.

My mother-in-law, Pet Campbell Stutts, would have been 100 years old last Sunday. Judy sent flowers to the little church that her mother attended for all her adult life. Pet grew up in tough circumstances and started picking cotton when she was six years old. The house she lived in didn't have electricity of indoor plumbing. After she married Eldred Stutts, who worked in his father's little grocery store, earning $6 a week and his groceries, she milked a cow every morning to earn extra money. When Eldred took over the store, she started to work there. She got up every day at around 5:00 and cooked breakfast. Then she'd clean the house before going to work. At noon she'd cook lunch in the kitchen in back of the store. After she cleaned up the dishes, she'd work until late afternoon before going home to fix supper.

She believed in work and judged people by how much and how hard they worked. She didn't consider my teaching job to be work, but she was willing to cut me a break because I was her son-in-law. She thought people who took naps were lazy, and she didn't think much of anybody who didn't work all day. She was still mowing her own lawn with a push-type power mower until shortly before she died at age 94. Her house was the cleanest I've even been in. She's the only person I know who regularly mopped her garage.

She never accepted any help from anybody if she could avoid it. In her later years she did allow me and Judy to buy some things for her, but not much. We wanted to do a lot more, but she simply refused to let us. She did accept her Social Security and Medicare, but she'd paid into both of those programs since their inception. Her income was from her Social Security checks and the small interest she earned on her savings. In the last ten or so years of her life, she didn't pay income taxes. A remarkable person by anybody's reckoning, and one of the 47%.

I provided a blurb for this collection, and it's well worth picking up. I'm a fan of Brewer's paperback novels, but I didn't know a thing about his short fiction. Fortunately David Rachels did. He's located it and published the best of it here. You get twenty-five stories, Rachels' excellent introduction, a bibliography of Brewer's short fiction, and a short note on the texts. You just can't go wrong.Redheads Die Quickly and Other Stories: Gil Brewer,David Rachels: 9780813044064: Amazon.com: Books: Brewer revolutionized the availability of reading-as-entertainment for the American people by helping to exploit a new market: the paperback original. Many of his novels, including the bestselling 13 French Street, have recently been reissued for a new audience. However, Redheads Die Quickly and Other Stories is the first collection of his short fiction. Because his work was published in a large number of pulp magazines, and because he regularly didn’t publish stories under his own name, Brewer’s fans—and fans of hard-boiled noir fiction in general—have often been frustrated in their efforts to find the work of this mid-century American crime writer. David Rachels has sifted through the Brewer papers at the University of Wyoming, thumbed thousands of publications, and tracked down rare pulp magazines on eBay, to create the first-ever authoritative list of Brewer’s short stories, with the best featured in a single volume.

NYTimes.com: Jerome Kilty, an actor and playwright known for writing epistolary dramas — most notably “Dear Liar,” his adaptation of 40 years of amorous correspondence between George Bernard Shaw and one of the London theater’s most temperamental actresses — died on Sept. 6 in Norwalk, Conn. He was 90.

Pryor Wright is a talk-show host, who of course bears no resemblance to any person living or dead. His devoted listeners number in the millions, and he says things like this: "What more could he do to ruin this country? Wake up, people! He's hell-bent on destroying the America that you and I love. And I'll be honest with you, I'm afraid. And you ought to be afraid, too." Maren Garrity works for a private-investigating firm that's looking to expose some people who sell counterfeit handbags. Her brother is hospitalized as a result of terrible beating he received at the hands of some gay bashers. Maren's also a member of an amateur theatrical group.Harry Thorne's part of an FBI team investigating some illegal arms dealers who happen the be the same people Maren is investigating.There's more. A lot more. Before it's over Maren is using at least three different names and various disguises. The theatrical troupe is working a big con on Pryor Wright. There are arms deals going down, not to mention handbag deals. I'll let you read the book to sort it all out. It's funny and farcical, the characters are interesting, and somehow the author manages to pull it all together at the end.Speaking of the author, I wasn't familiar with Robin Lamont, but she's had quite a career, having come to writing only recently. She's sung on Broadway and in the movies (in Godspell), been a p.i., and served as an assistant D.A. in New York. A lot of this comes through in the book. Check it out.

Yahoo! Sports: NFL Films President Steve Sabol, half of the father-son team that revolutionized sports broadcasting and mythologized pro football into the country's favorite sport, died Tuesday from brain cancer. He was 69.

I've read this one, and it's a really great take on the Dead Man. Christa Faust brings it!The Death Match (Dead Man #13): Lee Goldberg,William Rabkin,Christa Faust: Amazon.com: Kindle Store: While investigating a grisly and eerily familiar murder, Matt Cahill is drawn into the violent world of underground cage fighting. He agrees to help Stacy Barnett, hot-headed young grappler whose best friend and fellow female fighter has gone missing. Stacy’s friend turns out to be more than a friend and the kinky fetish wrestling matches she’s involved with turn out to be something far more sinister. As Matt uncovers layer after layer of twisted horror, he finds himself locked into a no holds barred fight to the death—and beyond—that will leave him questioning everything, including himself.

NYC Breaking News: A recent survey by Travel Leisure magazine ranked New York the dirtiest American city. The online poll of 50,000 people found that rats, funky odors and trash heaps were the main factors for the dubious distinction.
If there isn't enough dirt for you, it also "won" the survey for being the loudest and rudest city in the country.It also ranked worst for affordability.

latimes.com: John Ingle, 84, an actor who played scheming patriarch Edward Quartermaine on the daytime drama "General Hospital," died of cancer Sunday in Los Angeles, ABC said. Ingle took over the role as the ruthless businessman Quartermaine from actor David Lewis in 1993 and made his final appearance in an episode airing last week. He also played Mickey Horton on "Days of Our Lives" during a two-year break from "General Hospital" beginning in 2004.

Six years ago, I had a few comments about a book called The Pirates! In an Adventure with Scientists. The book's now become a movie called The Pirates! Band of Misfits in the U. S., though in Britain it retained the original title. It's really a great-looking animated film, and though I don't think it got much of a chance in U. S. theaters, I found it fast-moving and funny with some really nice action sequences.

The plot's simpler than the one in the book. The Pirate Captain wants to be "Pirate of the Year," even though he hardly has a chance against the really great pirates. After all, he's barely a midlist pirate. By chance he meets up with Charles Darwin, who discovers that the Pirate Captain's parrot is actually a dodo. Darwin suggests the possibility of great reward for the scientific discovery. Hilarity ensues. Or it did for me if not for the majority of movie critics. Favorite line: "You can't make everything all right just by saying 'arrrr' at the end of a sentence."

Monday, September 17, 2012

This just goes to show how far out of it I am. I didn't even know about this series, but there are something like 35 books in it already. I was thoroughly entertained by this one, and you can read my Amazon review of it at this link.Magic Lantern (Rogue Angel): Alex Archer: 9780373621569: Amazon.com: Books: In late 1700s Paris, a young but promising illusionist dabbles in the arcane art of phantasmagoria. But at his moment of greatest triumph—unveiling a magical lantern said to open a door to the Chinese spirit world—he is violently struck down by a vengeful phantom….
On assignment in London, archaeologist Annja Creed is hunting down a man who claims to have discovered the Jekyll and Hyde potion. On the trail of one curiosity, Annja finds herself pulled toward another mystery…the origin of a strange, old-fashioned projector once used by eighteenth-century illusionists. As Annja delves into its rich history, a dark past begins to emerge. And someone wants to harness the power of this cursed artifact…risking everything for the treasures it promises.
But Annja has a little magic trick of her own. One that she wields with deadly accuracy….

NYTimes.com: Eva Figes, a refugee from Nazi Germany who became an acclaimed novelist, memoirist and critic best known for an influential feminist treatise, “Patriarchal Attitudes,” published in 1970, died on Aug. 28 at her home in London. She was 80.

I've read and remarked on three or four of Chris Knopf's previous novels in two different series, the ones about Sam Aquillo (here's one example) and Jackie Swaitkowski (here, for example). His new one features a different character, Arthur Cathcart. In the first few pages of the book, Arthur loses his wife and almost his life. He suffers a severe head wound. Really severe. So when he finally regains consciousness and begins to recover, he has a long way to go both physically and mentally. He's determined, however, to find out the reasons for what's happened to him and to do something to the people responsible. He goes about it with computers. He knows a lot about them, even more than some of the hotshots in the movies. ("Hollywood doesn't know that half of it.") He uses disguises. Trickery. Elaborate con games (including a great Gatsbyesque party).Sometimes, as he admits, Cathcart is no longer sure who he is, but he knows he's not who he used to be. His brain doesn't work the way it used to, not entirely, and he's lost a bit of what I suppose I'd call his humanity. So his struggle's not just to find out what happened and why but to recover a bit of himself, or at least to find out who he's become and to make peace with that.Knopf does a fine job of storytelling here. It's engrossing entertainment with an edge, and since there's at least one big plot thread left unresolved, I'm sure that he's started a new series. I'm looking forward to finding out what happens to Cathcart in the next volume, and I'm betting you will be, too, after you read this one. Check it out.

Murder of a Beauty Shop Queen: A Dan Rhodes Mystery (Sheriff Dan Rhodes Mysteries): Bill Crider: 9780312640170: Amazon.com: Books: Dan Rhodes, sheriff of Blacklin County, Texas, is called to the Beauty Shack, where the young and pretty Lynn Ashton has been found dead, bashed over the head with a hairdryer. The owner said Lynn had gone to the salon late to meet an unknown client. There was a lot of gossip going on about Lynn before her death, but no one seems to really know much about her, or they’re not telling Rhodes. Lynn was known to flirt, and it’s possible an angry wife or jilted lover had something to do with her death. The salon owner suspects two outsiders who have been staying in an abandoned building across the street. While he investigates the murder, Rhodes must also deal with the theft of copper and car batteries, not to mention a pregnant nanny goat that is terrorizing the town. Murder of a Beauty Shop Queen is a wonderful entry in this always delightful series by award-winning author Bill Crider.

Sunday, September 16, 2012

NOLA.com: James “Sugar Boy” Crawford, the New Orleans rhythm & blues singer who wrote and recorded the enduring Mardi Gras standard “Jock-A-Mo,” died early Saturday while under hospice care following a brief illness. He was 77.